Americans stressed by 9/11 have higher heart disease rates

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Jan 07, 2008 | 3:56 PM

Americans who said they became anxious and stressed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - some just from watching the collapse of the World Trade Center's twin towers on television - reported higher rates of heart disease up to three years later, researchers said.

While several studies have found high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in first responders or attack survivors, most of the roughly 2,000 participants in this study, published in January's editions of the Archives of General Psychiatry, had no direct connection to Sept. 11.

Using a sample of more than 2,000 adults who reported their medical history to Internet research firm Knowledge Networks, researchers asked them if they experienced anxiety after Sept. 11, and then conducted follow-up surveys for the first three years after the attacks.

The participants said they experienced flashbacks and worries about terrorism in the weeks after the attacks.

In the three years after the attacks, they said they were either diagnosed for the first time or diagnosed with worsening cases of hypertension, irregular heartbeats and other heart problems, said lead researcher Alison Holman of the University of California-Irvine.

Before Sept. 11, 21.5 percent of the participants reported heart ailments, while three years after the attacks, 30.5 percent of the participants had developed heart problems, the study said. People who said they were acutely stressed by the attacks were more than twice as likely to have hypertension one year after the attacks, and more than three times as likely to have heart problems two years after the attacks, the study said.

Holman said the findings document the physical consequences of stress, especially from watching upsetting events on television. More than 60 percent of the participants watched the Sept. 11 attacks on live television.

"Seeing something as stressful as that on television is a very important thing to consider," Holman said. "You don't necessarily have to be in the towers or in the Pentagon to be at risk for other problems."

The study reported the increased heart disease rates even after adjusting their findings to account for other factors that could cause similar ailments, such as smoking and diabetes.

"I was surprised at how robust our findings were," she said. "We controlled for everything."

All of the participants completed online surveys to update researchers on their health; they were not examined or interviewed beyond the researchers' surveys. That method is also used in research based on the World Trade Center Health Registry, which started with more than 70,000 people who either worked or lived near ground zero.

The city department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which runs the registry, has no data on heart problems that resulted from exposure to the attacks but is beginning a study on the issue.